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Page 63

November 13-14, 2017 Paris, France

International Conference on

PLASMA CHEMISTRY AND

PLASMA PROCESSING

Journal of Biotechnology and Phytochemistry

Volume 1, Issue 2

Plasma Chemistry 2017

Determining the thickness and the sub-

structure details of the magnetopause from

MMS data

R Manuzzo, G Belmont and L Rezeau

Laboratoire de Physique des Plasmas, France

he magnetopause thickness, like its mean location, is a

notion that can have different meanings depending which

parameters are consideredmagnetic fieldor plasma properties.

In any case, all the determinations have been done, up to

now, considering the magnetopause boundary as a structure

strictly stationary and 1D (or with a simple curvature). These

determinations have shown to be very sensitive to the accuracy

of the normal direction, because it affects the projection of

the quantities of interest in studying geometrical sensitive

phenomena such as the magnetic reconnection. Furthermore,

the 1D stationary assumptions are likely to be rarely verified

at the real magnetopause. The high-quality measurements of

MMS and their high time resolution now allow investigating

the magnetopause structure in its more delicate features and

with an unequal spatio-temporal accuracy. We make use here

of the MDD tool developed by which gives the dimensionality

of the gradients from the four-point measurements of MMS

and allows estimating the direction of the local normal when

defined. Extending this method to various quantities, we can

draw their profiles as functions of a physical abscissa length

instead of time along a sensible normal. This procedure

allows answering quantitatively the questions concerning the

locations and the thicknesses of the different sub-structures

encountered inside the "global magnetopause”.

J Biot Phyt 2017